Mexico and El Salvador has received the most international recognition for street gang development as a result of US deportation, but other countries in South & Central America & the Caribbean including Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Domincan Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, French Guiana, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti [d'Haïti], Honduras, Jamaica, Mexico [Estados Unidos Mexicanos], Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru [Perú], Puerto Rico, Suriname, Uruguay, Venenzuela and many other islands in the Caribbean.

hey im brazilian and i had a friend who just came to australia who spent a while in juvenile. they are sort of like a australia i guess with all the hip hop and rap influence.
i think if this is right i duno if they exist or not but heres one gang i know in brasil:

DO THE GANG'S OUT HERE HAVE ANY CONNITON TO L.A. GANG'S OR ARE THEY ON SOMETHING TOTALY DIFERNT. I PLAN ON GOING OUT THERE ONCE MY PAPER IS FAT.. THE WOMEN ARE FINE BUT I HEARD THERE AID'S RATE IS HIGH... BUT FUCCC IT I STAY STRAPED ..WELLL I DONT KNOW I WOULD LIKE TO GO THO.... SEE WHAT THERE BANGING IS LIKE

they dont bang like in LA. it's totally different..any the movie CITY OF GOD (CIDADE DE DEUS) isnt what really happens in brasil and isnt that violent constantly. if u got to brasil just hide ur gold wen u walk thru the streets especially in rio. the favelas are just money hungry thieves so try to fit in with the 3rd world style of clothes, slang etc...they mostly waste time or keep stealing and so on..i havent been there in a few years but the media even got to interview the gang members in action murdering this girl in a car just because she wrote in a song 'U Can Have My Love If I Died In A Car.....Hav Anything But Just Don't Be The One For My Death'..something like that and yeah..shit gets pretty serious over there but i dont say it's always dangerous..just careless ppl who kill for fun or reputation..but they still dont do as much shit like the gang bangers in LA do..oh and 20% percent of the time the criminals get caught for murder..at the most 20 %

I've heard in the olden days there were gangs in Brazil, not the kind that would carry around guns and such but I mean like Capoeira gangs, you should know what i'm talking which these groups would do Capoeira and they use what I've have heard from sharp razors on their feet.

Ye,its too exagerated the movie,and ye too,the prisions are the worst,but just in rio de janeiro is,in sao paulo where i live the police is strong,but the factions is more...and dont have capoeira gangs here.The gangs have the formation with tribs,like punks,hip hopers,clubbers,rockeiros etc...but almost are envolved with drugs,and live in favelas.Heliopolis is the worst favela in SP.Any more quastions?

ON PATROL: A Brazilian military police officer patrols the streets of the Morro de Dende shantytown in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Friday. Since Wednesday, some 500 police have been occupying the shantytowns in an attempt to keep the peace and hunt down gang members responsible for the deaths of 12 people earlier this week.
AP

Police patrol after brutal killings by Brazil gangs
500 officers look in shantytowns to find gang members who killed 12 people

RIO DE JANEIRO, Brazil (AP) -- The heavily armed police patrolling the narrow alleys of the Morro de Dende shantytown stand out like an occupying army in their own city.

Some 500 police have been occupying the favela, as the shantytowns are known here, since Wednesday to try to keep the peace and hunt down gang members responsible for the deaths of at least 12 people the day before.

"We're here to suffocate the drug gangs and combat them without truce," police Col. Pedro Paulo the Silva said. "It's a war here."

The killings and subsequent police operation serve to highlight the growing power of drug gangs who have long controlled the city's favelas as if they were a state within a state.

On Tuesday night, a power struggle, sparked by the arrest Sunday of gang leader Ronaldo Souza Costa, left 12 people dead in a bloody shoot out -- a gruesome body count, even by the city's elevated standards.

Rio de Janeiro has one of the world's highest murder rates with around 50 homicides per 100,000 residents; in the favela the murder rate is triple that.

While the gang members fought it out, police surrounded the shantytown but waited until morning to enter.

Once inside, they found 12 bodies, nine of them shot execution style at close range and left in a van. Five other people were killed in drug-related violence around the city the same night.

An uneasy peace appeared to be holding with the presence of the police, but many of the local residents seem as wary of police as they are of the drug gangs.

"Residents trust the drug dealers more than the police. The police come in shooting and for them everyone is a drug dealer. At least, the drug dealers are people we know, whom we've grown up with," said a 24-year-old favela dweller who declined to be identified.

Residents say the drug gangs even mete out their own brutal form of justice, "with the gangs making sure that no one robs from anyone else here and if they rob they die".

Drug dealers distribute toys for Christmas and distribute milk to mothers and ice cream to children; they also invite people to the "funk" dances they hold most weekends.

About a fifth of the city's population, or more than 1 million people, live in the favelas, which sprang up over the last century as poor people looking for a place to live were forced higher and higher up the city's steep hillsides.

Over the years, the crude mud and stick shacks made way for hovels built from exposed brick and concrete; tin roofs gave way to shingles.

For many years, the favelas occupied a romantic place in the city's lore, which depicted them as poor but happy places where samba and carnival were born.

That romantic notion began to change in the 1970s with the arrival of a thriving cocaine trade and lack of a police presence.

Today, the drug gangs posses arsenals similar to those of small armies.

During their occupation of the Morro de Dende, the Silva and his men uncovered a network of tunnels and a hidden barracks filled with bunk beds where the gangs drug soldiers apparently lived.

On several occasions, like the United Nations' Earth Summit here in 1992 and this year's carnival celebrations, the army has been called in to keep the drug violence from spilling over into the city streets.

But more often, the battle is fought with all the characteristics of a low-grade guerrilla conflict -- drug dealers killed here, a police car strafed by automatic weapon fire there.

After years of trying to ignore the favelas or sweep them under the rug, the city has changed course and is trying to make its presence felt. "We are no longer trying to remove the favelas, what we are doing now is trying to incorporate them into the city," municipal housing secretary Solange Amaral said in a recent interview.

RIO DE JANEIRO -- On a steep hillside, an organization is generously maintaining the local soccer field, donating cash to help operate day-care centers, providing cheap transit, staging musical extravaganzas, offering medicine and food to needy families and assuring the security of the more than 250,000 residents packed into the massive Rocinha ghetto.

There are many such organizations operating throughout Brazil. In Rocinha, as in other favelas, the haphazardly constructed slums across Rio and other big cities in Latin America's largest nation, the organizations are known as "the Parallel Power" -- the new euphemism for Brazil's increasingly omnipotent drug lords.

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Residents of the favelas, where about 40 percent of the population in this tropical metropolis can be found, say the well-organized gangs of drug traffickers have essentially replaced the regular government. In a relationship not unlike that between Italy and its old Mafia dons, the drug lords of Rio have become the people's benefactors. In return, the traffickers are winning greater control over their territory, a measure of goodwill from the community and an expanding market for their wares.

A powerful drug gang called the Red Command, for example, is providing residents with everything the legitimate government cannot, said Alexandre de Brito, 43, a barber in Rocinha, widely considered Latin America's largest shantytown.

"They help us out in so many ways, doing things for the good of the community," he said, pointing to white Volkswagen vans darting up and down the steep roads. The vans, he and others here said, were provided by the drug dealers after residents complained about poor municipal bus service.

"The [traffickers] make the streets safe -- I haven't been robbed in years -- and if you're in need, they find a way to help you out," de Brito said. "For us, they are not the problem, they are part of our solution."

The rise of the benevolent drug dealer, analysts here say, is part of the new and growing cocaine culture in Brazil. According to a State Department report compiled last year and disputed by the Brazilian government, this sprawling nation of 170 million is the world's second-largest consumer of cocaine, after the United States. Brazilians use an estimated 40 to 50 tons per year, the report said.

The drug dealers have developed a controversial, sympathetic image here. For instance, in "City of God," a successful Brazilian movie that was the talk of the Cannes Film Festival this year, cocaine traffickers are separated into good guys and bad guys. In the film, one particularly heralded dealer is described by a narrator as "a guy who everyone loved" -- and a party for him is shown as a community event, attended even by members of the local Catholic church.

"I think the point is that the traffickers are not psychopaths, as some people would like to make them out to be," said Katia Lund, co-director of the film. "They are human beings who are responding to their surroundings. I don't think this is a glorification of traffickers, I think it's a humanization of them. This is real, and it's happening all around this city. The government can't provide the people with what they need, so the traffickers often step in and fill in the blanks."

The traffickers have, in ways once unimaginable, gained a foothold in the life of the city. In one highly publicized incident, Carrefour -- a French-owned discount chain similar to Wal-Mart and Sam's Club -- allegedly contracted a drug gang to send a message to residents after a wave of shoplifting last year. According to a report compiled by Rio-based Global Justice, a human rights group, two suspected female shoplifters accused store officials of calling in gang members to "teach them a lesson." One of the women claims to have been severely beaten and then forced to walk with a gasoline-doused tire around her neck before her friend escaped and called the police.

Critics are citing huge societal dangers in destigmatizing drug dealers -- not the least of which is underplaying the problem of Brazil's drug violence. Last week, for instance, a notorious drug lord -- Luiz Fernando the Costa, known by his street name Fernandinho Beira-Mar, or Seaside Freddy -- staged a city-wide revolt from his prison cell. Using a smuggled cell phone, authorities allege, he orchestrated the assassinations of four leaders of rival drug gangs -- touching off gang wars across Rio that effectively shut down many of the favelas for days.

Such violent gang rivalries -- as well as clashes between the traffickers and police -- caused the death of 3,937 children and adolescents from December 1987 to November 2001, the Rio-based Institute for Religious Studies said in a report this month. By comparison, 467 children and adolescents were killed by weapons fire in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during the same period, said the report, which was funded by the Ford Foundation.

The ruthlessness of Rio's drug dealers was also put in the national spotlight in June, when one of the city's most respected investigative journalists, Tim Lopes, was savagely tortured and killed by gang members. Lopes's body was found burned and mutilated after he tried to film the child prostitution and cocaine dealing going on openly at Rio's funk music balls -- wild neighborhood parties hosted by drug dealers in the favelas where drugs, sex and exploitation of poor youths are common.

"Brazil is facing an unprecedented drug violence problem, and perhaps the biggest danger is that we are not taking it seriously enough," said Argemiro Procopio, a researcher on the drug problem and a professor of international relations at the University of Brasilia. "There is not enough condemnation of the dealers going on -- in fact, we are now seeing just the opposite. You have young kids and even adults out there who are idolizing them. This has got to stop."

Deep inside Rio's favelas, however, the drug dealers appear to rule absolutely. The favelas serve as the perfect fortress for organized crime -- they have one entrance and one exit, which are almost always guarded by gang members. The gangs have become so well armed, possessing grenades and even rocket launchers, that local law enforcement is finding itself at a loss to combat them.

On a steep hill in Rocinha, Edmilson Valentim, a candidate for Rio's city council in elections next month, handed out glossy fliers in the street. When asked about the dealers, he began rattling off the good things they have done for the community.

"There is no debate going on about whether they should be here or not -- they just are, it's a fact of life, and they make it easier on everyone by helping out in the community," he said. "If we did not have so much need, so much misery here, perhaps we would not need them. But we do have need and misery, and someone needs to help the people."

On Rocinha's cement walls and along its winding corridors, posters advertise free concerts that many people admit are financed by drug dealers. Nene, a 34-year-old singer in a popular band who asked that his full name be withheld, said his group requested, and received, permission to play from the drug lords in several favelas. In recent years, the drug lords have become the band's patrons, buying the musicians guitars and other equipment. Nene said the traffickers are paying a Rio radio station about $4,000 a month to play one of the group's songs twice a day.

The group's performances, however, are almost always used by dealers as an opportunity to market cocaine to poor residents. The drug, mixed with cheap baking soda, sells for less than $1 a line.

"Look, it's a chain of favors," Nene said. "The dealers pay us, the people get entertainment, and the dealers then make some money off us by selling. That's the way it works now. You don't have to buy drugs to listen to the music, and the people seem to really like it. It works out okay for us."

It does not, however, work out for everyone.

Antonio Jemrefom, 10, criticized life in Rocinha: "I don't like it here -- there are traffickers everywhere with guns, and you hear shooting all the time during the night. It scares me." He was interrupted by a representative of Rocinha's community association, which government authorities and criminal experts here have closely linked to the drug dealers. The representative dismissed the boy's words as "the comments of an uninformed child."

From what i've heard from people living in Brasil, specifically Rio, the movie City of God is very accurate. All the violence portrayed in the film was in the time of a power struggle so shit like that is going to happen no matter what.
Apparently the favelas are quite safe for anyone too and almost anyone go into them unless your from a rival gang of course. Some areas though you need the gang members permission to travel tough and its usually easy to get if you ask. Apparently most of the muggings of tourists occur in Copacobana, if stuff like that happens in the favelas the culprits are usually punished because that attract police to the favelas and is 'bad for business'.
Basically............watch City of God! its an amazing film.

I got a friend from RIO who says that the gangs there would whoop the shit outta the police. As a matter of fact, they have many times went into the campus of a university and taken over...Also the gangs have been known to shut down roads or highways...That shit is crazy.

im not from brasil but my parents are from the favelas of rio de janeiro, and trust me you people saying they dont bang like in LA your wrong, they bang alot harder then america period. its even lil ass kids out there killin people and shit, and that city of god shit with that war shit it happens everyday in rio and sao paulo and i mean EVERYDAY. its alot of robbery murders over there but also the favelas fight each other it be big ass wars and shit, the cops cant even come up there and when they do the cops come like 50 deep and shit and still get they asses shot up.

Brasil is beautiful, ive been there twice, im planning on going for carnivale this year, when i went there before there were areas we were told not to goto because of gang violence, and how these two gangs go to these big music festivals and bout against each other while music plays - i doubt its as pretty as only the strong tho haha

I'm from the favelas of Rio and I lived in Sao Paulo before shit is fucked up there I moved to New York City and people say the streets is tough but is nothing compared to the violence over there but in Rio now adays it's not really gangs that shut down everything it's the drug dealers they're not street gangs theyre like organizations

^^^^^^ it aint just cos they poor. the police are responsible for a lot of murders in the favela, especially young people. they take kids up the favela when they are flushing the place out for dealers and the kids dont always come back down.

Anyone who has the City of God dvd there is a documentary about Rio on the special features.

It also says someone is murdered on average every 30mins in Rio. Thats 17000 murders a year. That makes a murder rate of 109.5 per 100,000, however i think the documentary is exaggerating this slightly, but in 1992 the Rio murder rate was 86 per 100,000.

a hard core favela in Rio,or Sao Paolo is more violent than any Ghetto in the US hands down! the gangs there have more fire power (including missle launchers), the cops are ALMOST ALL corrupt and the poverty is even worse, it's like Mad Max meets Boy N' the Hood!